Guerilla found Killzone assets in a shoe box, stored on tape

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Back at the beginning of September Sony confirmed that a Killzone Trilogy was making its way to PlayStation 3 on October 23. The surprise announcement was the inclusion of the first game, which originally released on the PlayStation 2 and has been remastered to 720p for the re-release. What they didn’t mention was the fact we nearly didn’t get a Killzone HD because the assets weren’t taken care of after the launch of the original game.

Guerilla Games and Sony released the original Killzone back in 2004, making the title 8 years old. Back then Guerilla wasn’t taking advantage of cloud storage and massive, multi-terabyte hard drives. Instead, content was backed up to tape. And with the game being so old, relatively speaking, the tapes were “stored away.” By that I mean when it came time to find the assets for a HD rework, Guerilla discovered them in a shoe box in the cellar of an IT support staff’s home. Even worse, they didn’t have a tape reader for that type of tape anymore so didn’t think they’d be able to view them.

The tapes weren’t kept with any documentation detailing what was on them, but luckily a record was found elsewhere that matched. Using the documentation and figuring out which tape held what data, four tapes were discovered that Guerilla still had a reader for and the assets were recovered. The source code was much easier to find as a copy was still stored on the developer’s CVS repository.

It seems strange a game that was thought of so highly of by Sony, and which spurred them on to do two further games, would be backed up so poorly, or at the very least not kept safely once the project was over. Lucky for Guerilla, the IT guy’s cellar wasn’t damp. Otherwise the Killzone Trilogy would have been a two-game release or included some SD emulated version of the PS2 original.